React 17rc, Code as a UI, and Fragments

From the official React blog, here’s the announcement for a release candidate of React 17. The headline is eye-catching: this release doesn’t include any new features and few breaking changes. So what’s going on? From the announcement: “this release is primarily focused on making it easier to upgrade React itself.”

If Rome, a new library by Sebastian McKenzie, lives up to even some of its ambitions, the terrain of JavaScript tooling could change. Rome is aiming to “unify the entire frontend development toolchain” providing a linter, compiler, bundler, test runner, and more. Very exciting!

Paperclip is: “a language for UI primitives that allows you to build React applications more quickly, and with fewer CSS bugs.” Styles are defined in a .pc file, and imported into your component. With a Storybook-like preview feature, isolated styles, and TypeScript integration, this looks promising!

Hungry for some fresh React conference talks? Check out the React Rally 2020 Live Stream, recorded on August 14 on YouTube. Topics covered include: “React Native, state management, animation, community, universal JavaScript, and so much more.”

Consider this post from Max Rozen a cheat sheet to the common React component libraries of today. If you haven’t considered using a component library, you should– the choices are better than ever.

In honor of this week’s React Rally conference, I’m including this talk by Justin Falcone from React Rally 2019. Watch as Justin narrates the past and present of web development while demoing his toy-language generator Zebu. It’s all in the service of a powerful idea: code is a user interface, and the experience it provides matters.

Fragments are a core part of React. They solve a real-world problem: how does one return a collection of children without adding an extra node to the DOM? I’ve always preferred the React.Fragment syntax over the terser alternative.